


Against the Present

by distr0



Category: Kill la Kill
Genre: F/F, dream fic, implied ust, second person narrative, w/e that means
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-08-10 17:03:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7853653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distr0/pseuds/distr0
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You dream of what could have been, what was, and what is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Against the Present

The cold bites at your fingers through knitted gloves. Your hands—tiny and numb and yet unmarred—are the first indicator that you’re a time and place far from the present. The second is the sound of clumsy footsteps wading in the snow behind you. Her voice is small and crystalline, nothing like what you’re used to. You believe she might break should she fall face first into the snow.

“Nee-san,” she calls. Her little nose has turned bright red thanks to the chill. She sniffles once to keep it from running. “Wait for me.”

The age gap between you seems right, this time. You’ve never spent nearly enough time around children for your guess to be certain. Five years old, you’d say. One of her mittens has slipped off her hand, and she holds it tightly in her fist as she negotiates how high to lift her leg to take her next step forward. Your legs are long enough, coordinated enough, not to face the same difficulty.

“Are you cold, Ryuko?”

She shakes her head from side to side resolutely, tongue peeking out to lick at the snot over her top lip. Her hood is pulled over her ears. It makes a light scratching sound with her movements.

You take her bare hand between your own. Something’s off about its proportions; they’re not soft and round as a child’s should be. It doesn’t give you pause. You bring her hand to your face and puff against her skin to warm it.

“Mommy said I have to take care of you,” you tell her.

Everything surrounding the both of you goes still. You realize only now that it’s snowing. The flakes fall slowly, like the air is nearly dense enough to keep them in permanent suspension. Ryuko suddenly grows distracted by the powder at her feet, pulls away from you, and squats down to ruin its pristine surface with the tip of her gloved hand.

“Mommy said play today,” Ryuko sing-songs. “Play, play, play. I like playing with Mommy.”

You feel your stomach drop. Your heart sinks down with it, too, and falls down into the widening hole Ryuko’s digging with her hand. It’s a piece of you—the real you—spilling out into this fairytale.

“Satsuki likes playing with Mommy, too? Mommy buys her toys? And Mommy reads her stories and sings her songs?”

It feels like something alive is crawling up the back of your throat. You swallow it down and say, “No, she only does that with you.”

Even here, you know you’re second best.

“Why?”

“You’re the favorite.”

You expect another ‘why’ to follow, but Ryuko doesn’t speak. Instead, she stops widening the hole before her, and stands to look you in the eye. Her glove is wet with snow. She raises it to her face to try and brush her hair away from her eyes with as much care as she can manage. You bring your own dexterous fingers up to do the job properly.

“Do you want to go inside?” you ask her. She takes her glove off, looks at the discolored gradient of blue creeping along her fingernails, and nods. You take her hand, ice cold, in yours. A quaint veranda topped over with heaps of snow frames the front door to the house you lead her towards. It’s not the manor you grew up in. Through the window just off to the right, you make out your mother’s silhouette. But she’s nowhere to be found by the time the both of you find your way inside.

Ryuko stands by the line of coat hooks in the entryway, waving her arms back and forth to call your attention, and commands, “Help.” You peel away your own jacket, and leave it carelessly to lie in a bundle against linoleum tiles. Your boots follow, and you step carefully around the puddles of melted snow you’ve made, so as not to soak your socks.

The zipper of Ryuko’s coat catches a few times. Once it’s down, she slides it off her shoulders as you kneel to undo the Velcro straps securing her boots. The little barbed edges scrape at the skin over the pads of your fingers.

“I’m cold now,” she complains, as your own frigid hands work to pry her heel loose from her shoe.

“The fire’s waiting.”

It sparks and crackles on the hearth one room over. She falls to her haunches before the flames, stretches out her legs and splays her miniature toes—makes croaking frog noises when she sees their amphibious shape—as she lets them warm the soles of her feet.

You wrap her in a white and yellow blanket you steal from the couch, and find a box of tissues sitting squarely over the glass table at the center of the room. You pluck one out from the top like you might pick a flower. The floor is warm where you settle down cross-legged beside Ryuko. You bring the tissue up to her nose to wipe it gently before she can take care of it against the blanket.

“Better?”

She nods.

Self-indulgently, you let yours arms pull her close into your chest, to smell her hair and feel her warmth. Her body is completely unresponsive—neither moving in nor pulling back. You stroke her cheek to find it cold as the winter air outside, so you hold your hand still so as to melt it back to life.

You think of the first time you ever touched her. She was small, and so were you, and you shared the space between the bared enclosure of an infant’s cradle. Soft pastel palettes colored the mobile, the sheets, the walls around. When she began to cry, you reached out to sooth her in lieu of waiting for a mother’s attention you knew would never come.

You know it isn’t real. Remembrance reminds you of the first time you actually touched her.

Prone on the ground, she lied beaten at your feet. The pallor of blood loss washed away the embarrassed tint in her cheeks from her transformation with Senketsu. And you—with cruelty did you ever wrangle her upright again. She was too weak to stop your hand, when you reached to yank a fistful of her hair. Anyone else would have bowed and bent before your will, would have turned tail or pleaded your mercy. But she, vulnerable as she was, raised a shaking hand to grip your arm and steady herself against her own weight.

She spat an insult at your feet. She smirked through her words, and for it, you threw her body back down against the ground. You might have kept on beating her if Mako hadn’t put herself between the two of you.

That was the first time you laid a hand on her.

The Ryuko in your mind doesn’t suffer the same treatment. You hold onto her like you might lose a piece of yourself should she slip from your embrace. You stroke her hair and let the tips of your fingers caress her neck, her face. The fire that warmed you an instant ago is gone, but your bodies tangle closer together in the blanket now.

Continuity has ruptured somewhere between your vision of playing in the snow and your memories of the real world, as it so often does in dreams like these. Without hard reason or evidence for it, you know by intuition that the Ryuko you now hold is older. You must be, too, because your bodies feel comparatively proportional. When you pull away a bit to look at her face—she doesn’t meet your eye—you think she might be as old as when you first met, perhaps a bit younger.

You never met in infancy. You never met your sister. You met Ryuko at eighteen, and one day she wore both mantles.

“I’m warm,” she tells you.

Your lips find her forehead, where you stay pressed for several seconds before pulling away. And when you do, a corolla of color whorls between the both of you, in the tiny space between your legs, where your hips might meet if you scooted closer. It’s a feeling in your chest more so than anything tangible.

You repeat the action against her temple, over her brow, her eyelids, her cheekbones, the tip of her nose—never kissing, only feathering touches. Her lips are soft when you reach them. You linger long enough to feel a heartbeat beneath the paper thin skin. Whether it’s yours or hers, you can’t say for certain.

“What are you doing to me?” she asks when you’ve pulled away.

You give her a real kiss this time, if only to shut up your subconscious.

The moment ends when she bites. It’s not sensual, not playful, not passionate. Her teeth, her sharp canines, dig into your lower lip. You feel the skin there break as it makes way for warm blood to pool against your gums. And it stains your teeth, seeps into the space just under your tongue. You can taste it now.

Ryuko releases you only out of necessity when she draws back, and you see that her eyes are swollen red, like she’s been crying without rest. “Why does it hurt?” she asks.

You shake your head.

Her fingers press against your cheek and she shows them to you, glistening wet, when she pulls away. “Why do you cry, if it feels good?”     

The blanket over your shoulders plasticizes to fuse into your skin like molten rubber. The walls of the house tear themselves apart at the corners, the flooring sinks into the ground, and the fireplace snuffs its flame away. It’s dark now; the two of you sit together in nothingness.

Your lips, still bleeding, part to let out a sigh against the corner of her jaw when she touches you. Her nails are long. They make you wince. “Does it hurt less, if I start it?”

You shake your head again, but will yourself to relax, to draw more of her in. The gentle hand she places at the back of your neck sooths away some of the pain, enough for you to reap pleasure. She breathes warm words against your ear. She makes you tremble. She makes your toes curl.

She didn’t used to be like this in your dreams.

You relax in her arms as you come down again, and a distant imagining of the past creeps into you. It’s from a time when she swore her father’s vengeance would be had by your head. You feel as though you’re viewing it from a black and white reel, and the Ryuko in this old dream—she’s like a ghost you never thought you’d see again.

She was always pushed, held down, plaintive.

Her arm, bent by your grasp, was pinned behind her back. Her legs shook and you guided her roughly down into your lap. You hardly had to move before she rocked against your hand herself—choking on the sounds she made.

She would constrict with the same fluttering cadence as the pulse you felt against the inside of her wrist. Entirely in your control. You loosed your hold in favor of settling your hand at her hip. Your nails scratched unforgivingly against her skin on the way there, carving red streaks that would raise and welt later. And still you pushed her harder, until she quivered and keened without restraint, until she begged.

She used to beg more often in those dreams, because that was the only way you’d have her. And every time, the fantasy shattered like glass at the sound of her crying your name. Not _Kiryuin_ , but _Satsuki_ —too sickly saccharine.

“Sats,” present Ryuko speaks as she cradles you close. That sounds a lot better. She rubs small circles into your shoulders, your back, and you imagine clearly the patterns they engrave over your skin.

She’s grown a good ten years older now. This is the version of her you can equate to the one that lives while you wake. The sweetness that spills from the corners of her mouth, the same way blood threatened to spill from yours, is not shocking. Its sincerity quiets your heart.

“I’m getting cold again,” she whispers. Her warmth pours from her lips and powderizes a cloud of the air between you. You search for something to cover your naked bodies with, but find nothing but hardwood flooring at your fingertips.

The house where you sat by the fireplace has erected itself again, though only partially. A few embers burn sadly, just out of reach, in a pile against the ground. And the walls fade away halfway up, where they start to blend into the whitened sky. Little flakes of paint, of snow, come floating down on the winds that sweep them into the open room. They melt as soon as they stick to your skin.

Ryuko’s fingernails turn purple, just as they were before you warmed them. The color in her lips drains to match. They peel and crackle, and one by one, bits of her crumble away. There are bruises on her face that fissure into cuts, following imaginary grooves left behind by the shadows of all kisses you gave her earlier.

“I die in wait.”

It’s how you break, face first into the little pile of pieces time has torn away from her.

**Author's Note:**

> This originally wasn't written with intent to publish. It's a small project I kept finding myself coming back to whenever my motivation to write other things was suffering. I think about Satsuki a lot, so writing her can feel very therapeutic. It helps me reset the bar.  
> I probably wrote only a couple hundred words (at most) of this at a time. Eventually, it got long enough that I thought it would be worth moving to my drafts on here. It's been sitting for a while now without my touching it, so I figured I might as well just post it while I still like it. It's a bit scattered, but hopefully I managed to convey at least some of the feelings/etc that I was shooting for.
> 
> (This Satsuki can be the same Satsuki as the one in my post-canon fic, if you want to read it that way)
> 
> tumblr's lifefibersync if ya wanna chat


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